Farming Concrete: NYC's community gardens

Hey FSC folks,
This is such a neat report on how much food community gardener's in NYC produce, a great way to see the impact of local growing. 
Check it out: Farming Concrete

Hi all,

The Farming Concrete team is pleased to present the results from our first year of measuring food production in NYC community gardens! Check out the report and article here. In 2010, 110 community gardeners weighed their harvests and crop inventory was conducted in 67 community gardens as part of the project (out of 500 community gardens in NYC). We used the average yields from the gardeners who weighed their harvests to estimate that in those 67 gardens, 87,700 lbs of fresh produce was grown on just 1.7 acres, worth more than $200,000. This year we hope to scale up and, if we're lucky, reach for an estimate for the whole city. Explore the results in more detail using our interactive webmap.

If you're in NYC and interested in signing up for this year's count, click here and we'll get you going right away! School gardens are invited to participate this year - in fact we've already delivered our first scale to a rooftop school garden in Brooklyn. More info on the different ways to participate here. If you're not in NYC but would like to get something like this started in your area, contact us directly - gardens@farmingconcrete.org.

HUGE thank you to all the record keepers who helped make last year a success! We're excited to get going again this year. Feel free to contact me with any questions you might have.

Best,
Mara

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Mara Gittleman
908.787.2711

Farm Assistant, Adjunct Lecturer

Kingsborough Community College

Project Director, Farming Concrete
www.farmingconcrete.org

www.foodcensus.org

www.gardenmaps.org

Kansas City: Center for Urban Agriculture!

Do you grow veggies in your backyard?  Has your neighborhood started a community garden that you grow in?  Are you an urban farmer that goes to market?  The number of people farming and gardening in our city has skyrocketed over the last few years in Kansas City, with more land than ever growing good food for individuals, their families, and the community.  We are setting up an ANNUAL GET GROWING KANSAS CITY MAP to keep track of how many new gardens and farms get started every year because we want to know HOW MANY OF YOU are growing and HOW MUCH LAND you are growing on and WHERE all this great activity is happening in our metro area. We ask ALL gardeners, farmers, and anyone with a tomato in a pot on the porch to be counted in an annual survey to show the progress our city is making toward a stronger and healthier local food system.  Haven’t started growing yet?  This is your call to hoes!  Get out in the dirt, plant some seeds, and get your growing counted! This mapping project is part of a new initiative, called Get Growing Kansas City, led by the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture, Kansas City Community Gardens, and Lincoln University's Innovative Small Farmers Outreach Program.  Over the next 2-3 years, the Get Growing KC Outreach Team will engage in a campaign to encourage and support our city to GET GROWING through: Home Gardening – you just can’t beat the pride and flavor of eating fresh picked tomatoes from your own backyard! Community Gardening – no land at home?  Find an empty lot and engage your neighbors to grow more than just food – you will grow relationships and strengthen community ties. School- and faith-based gardening/farming – schools and churches often have land and people available – what better way to use the resources than growing good food for kids or charity? Urban Farming – Soaring interest in eating fresh, local food means we need more urban farmers growing for markets, Community Supported Agriculture, restaurants and grocery stores. The team will also work to increase access to locally grown food- through farmers’ markets, on-site stands, and other community-based food projects.  If ever there was a time in history when we needed, as a society, to be taking more control over our food system and the food we put on our plates, it is now!    We hope you’ll pass this along to other growers you know – we want a true picture of what is growing in Kansas City! Please contact katherine@kccua.org with questions or comments about the mapping project.    Thank you for taking the time to fill out our survey and for all the work you do to Get Growing!

This message was sent to jennifer.hashley@tufts.edu from:

Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture | 4223 Gibbs Road | Kansas City, KS 66106, USA

Agriculture on institutional lands

FYI: Thanks Francey for sending this in from the COMFOOD listserve
Hello again,

Thanks very much to everyone who contacted me in regards to my request a few weeks ago for examples of commercial agriculture taking place on institutional lands. Below is a summary of responses I received. 

Caitlin

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• st. joseph’s hospital in Ann Arbor. They have a farm onsite, horse drawn ploy, etc
• Baltimore - ag projects on land owned by the city's school system. Non profit but they both sell food: http://www.greatkidsfarm.org/ and http://real-food-farm.org/

• CSA on a school property in Portland: Singer Hill Gardens www.singerhillgardens.org
• Brooklyn: 1 acre youth farm on front lawn of a public high school www.bkfarmyards.com
• City of Columbia, Missouri - Columbia Regional Waste Water Treatment Plan has a 125 acre parcel leased to a farmer to cut, rake, and bale hay, as well as a 65 acre tract leased to a farmer to grow soybeans and corn
• NYC - Mount Sinai hospital has a farmers market 
• Rodale Institute maintains a list of colleges with farms: http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/ffc_directory
• Virginia Tech 3,200 acre farm http://www.vaes.vt.edu/college-farm/index.htm - recommendation to check any university with a cooperative extension
• Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative - study about the feasibility of farming on wellheads, as well as other agricultural uses of public land
• a few responses about prison farms: report on their phasing out  http://www.cga.ct.gov/2008/rpt/2008-R-0081.htm (unfortunately, this is also a trend we've seen in Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2009/02/25/prison-farms.html); but also info about a group that is working to revive this http://blogs.evergreen.edu/sustainableprisons/about/
   
• finally, this article from Toronto http://www.agdevjournal.com/volume-1-issue-2/139-could-toronto-provide-10-of-its-fresh-vegetable-requirements-from-within-its-own-boundaries-matching-consumption-requirements-with-growing-spaces.html?catid=62%3Aurban-agriculture-call-papers 

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Caitlin Dorward

Research Associate, Institute for Sustainable Horticulture

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

604.365.0336

Exciting News about Minneapolis Local Food

Sent via Jennifer Hashley

FYI

Good news –

The Homegrown Minneapolis Urban Ag Policy Plan was passed by the Minneapolis City Council this morning! 

The plan is rooted in a two+ year process with extensive community input and close collaboration with the Minneapolis Departments of Health and Community Planning and Economic Development and the Homegrown Minneapolis initiative.

As Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak put it, “This plan represents hundreds of hours of work of volunteers and City staff, and it’s paid off.  The plan makes it easier to be part of the local, healthy, sustainable food movement and is a giant step toward helping our city and state move closer to food independence.”

Efforts here in Minneapolis were informed and inspired by the many communities around the country who blazed the trail on urban ag.  Thanks for sharing your sage advice and helping us make this a reality here in the Heartland!

You can see the plan itself at:  http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/dhfs/homegrown-home.asp

Reminder: Meeting 4.19 12pm

Food Security Coalition Members,
Our regularly scheduled meeting has been changed to Tuesdays @12 noon.
Tomorrow is our first meeting in the new time slot, same place (City Hall-Mayors Reception Room)
Hope to see you all there!